Alumni – PhD

Ke Huo is currently working at Facebook, developing Oculus VR headset. He received his Ph.D. degree in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue in 2019. Prior to joining the C Design Lab, he obtained his Bachelor's degree from Beihang University and subsequently Master's from University of Florida both in Aerospace engineering, worked on projects involving dynamics and control of electro-mechanical system. His current research interests include augmented reality, tangible interfaces, interactive creation, and robotics. Generally, he is fascinated by the intersection point where our physical world can be leveraged by digital intelligence. [Personal Website]

Sang Ho Yoon is currently working at Microsoft, Seattle, WA. He received his PhD at Purdue University and his B.S & M.S degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008 with major in Mechanical Engineering and minor in Robotics. He worked at Research Department in LG Display & LG Electronics for 5 years. There, he involved in product development for consumer electronics as well as the futuristic products including 'Transparent & Public Display', 'Assistive/Rehabilitation Robot', and 'Smart Car User Interface'. He is particularly interested in applying novel sensing techniques to bring the new forms of input metaphor for Human-computer interaction. Areas of interest include wearable/tangible interface, sensing techniques & fabrication, and novel input device. Currently, his research aims at combining the state-of-art machine learning approaches with novel sensing technique to better support natural human-computer interaction. [Personal Website][LinkedIn]

Chiho Choi is currently working at Honda Research Laboratory, Palo Alto, CA. He received his degree of Ph.D. in the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. Dr. Choi received a B.S. from Hanyang University, Korea in 2011, and a M.S. from University of Southern California, in 2013. His research interest lies at the intersection of machine learning and computer vision. He broadly builds machine learning algorithms in a practical way for computer vision systems. Currently,Choi is working as a research assistant in the Computational Design and Innovation Lab led by Professor Karthik Ramani, focusing on human shape interaction. [Personal Website][LinkedIn]

Joran is a research scientist and lecturer at Yale University and a Co-Advisor with Professor Tahira Reid. He received the degree of D-PhD in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. He received his bachelor's in mechanical engineering from the Brigham Young University. His research focuses on how students abstract and solve complex problems in early design phases, with a special emphasis on functional decomposition and sketching/visualization. Other research interests include prototyping, engineering history, education, family science, and history. Joran spends his free time volunteering, playing board games, hiking, playing music, or spending time outdoors. His past projects include starting the Purdue Maker's club, various sketching workshops, and simple robots. He recently finished an internship at IMMI, a top automotive safety products company.  Joran is a member of ASME and the Order of the Engineer. You can find more information at http://joranbooth.wordpress.com/.

Senthil Chandrasegaran is a postdoctoral scholar in the Visualization & Interface Design Innovation (VIDI) lab at the University of California, Davis. His work focuses on aiding collaboration through the capture and display of information generated in collaborative settings. Senthil was also a postdoctoral scholar at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park from April 2016 -- Aug 2017, where he worked on using visual analytics to aid qualitative analysis of data, and understanding physical and cognitive aspects of sketching during ideation. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue, where his work at the C Design Lab focused on understanding collaboration in the conceptual stages of design, by developing visual analytics-based techniques to make sense of multimodal design protocol data. In a past life before graduate school, he also worked in the automotive industry, specializing in interior trim design, and then in the heavy engineering industry, specializing in structural analysis and knowledge-based engineering. For more details, please visit his website [link].

Ayan is a PhD student in the School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University, since Fall 2011. He completed his undergraduate studies (B.Tech) from I.I.T., Kharagpur (Spring 2009) and subsequently received his masters (M.S.) from Georgia Tech (Spring 2011), all in mechanical engineering. His current work focuses on using random walks and spectral graph theory for understanding the multiscale structure and evolution of graphs over time. The applications include 3D shape analysis, retrieval, correspondence for geometric graphs (or manifolds) and clustering, evaluation, hierarchical community structure finding for social network graphs.

Wei Gao is currently a D-PhD student in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue. Mr. Gao received his bachelor degree (2009) in Mechanical engineering from the University of Shanghai for Science & Technology. His graduate research focuses on design, simulation and optimization of foldable, reconfigurable and self-assembly mechanisms/robotic systems, and developing novel 3D printing technique based on FDM and building self-contained appliances that allow printing fully-functional objects (customizable products, articulated working models, self-actuated devices).

Dev is starting as an Assistant Professor - Design Research at Aarhus University this in Fall 2017. He was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Global Engineering and Research Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from Feb 2016 - June 2017. He received his PhD in Dec 2015 from the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue. His research work in the C Design Lab focused on data representation and visualization models for supporting environmentally conscious product design. He has co-authored publications in the Journal of Mechanical Design, Journal of Computing and Information Science, Computer-Aided Design, Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineering International Design Engineering Technical Conferences. He has received the American Society of Mechanical Engineering Design for Manufacturing and the Lifecycle Scholar Development Award in 2014, and the Estus H. and Vashti L. Magoon Award for Teaching Excellence in 2015.  [Linked In Profile] [Personal Web Page]

Cecil Piya is a PhD graduate from the school of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. Dr. Piya received his BSc in mechanical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and earned his Doctorate at Purdue, while working as a graduate researcher in the C-Design Lab under Prof. Karthik Ramani. Here, his research explored novel Human-Computer Interactions and Digital Interfaces that leverage spatial gestures, tangible interactions, and pen-and-touch based media to support virtual 3D product design and shape modeling. In the past he also conducted research in areas such as digital shape reconstruction from 3D point clouds, geometric support for additive manufacturing, feature detection in 3D models, object identification in 2D images, and heat transfer.

Vinayak received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University in December 2015. The central theme of his research is the expression of design intent towards supporting early phase idea generation for product form exploration. During his Ph.D. at the C-Design Lab, he investigated symbolic and geometric interpretations of hand gestures, hand grasp, and arm movements for mid-air shape conceptualization. He extended these ideas to the tangible interactions for quick design ideation using hand-held mobile devices. Currently, he is a post-doctoral scholar in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University where he continues working at the C-Design Lab. His current research involves building systems for collaborative design using mobile technology.   Personal Webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/fvinayak1/    

Dr. William Z. Bernstein is a Mechanical Engineer in the Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) Group of the Systems Integration Division of the Engineering Laboratory (EL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Dr. Bernstein's research at NIST primarily contributes to two programs: (1) Performance Assurance for Smart Manufacturing Systems and (2) Enabling the Digital Thread for Smart Manufacturing. Prior to joining NIST, Dr. Bernstein was a member of the C-Design Lab at Purdue University. His research at Purdue was focused on establishing frameworks and methods to enable environmentally conscious product redesign activities. Central to this work was the idea of infusing principles from the fields of Information Visualization and Visual Analytics into sustainable design. Dr. Bernstein's current research interests include Sustainable Design, Data-driven Manufacutring, Product Lifecycle Management, Visual Analytics, and Information Visualization.

William Benjamin is a PhD Student at C Design Lab. His research interests include Human Computer Interaction, Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Apart form being a researcher, William is an avid photographer and artist. His goals that drive him are: -To work with an energetic team to create something phenomenal! -To practice engineering as an art. -To bring engineering into art. -To make Computer Vision interactive and relevant to real world. -To work among the best, most creative, and talented people in the world.